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A False Start on the Road to an All-American Bitcoin
Donald Trump pledged to cement the US as the bitcoin mining capital of the planet. The president’s sweeping tariffs stand to simultaneously undermine and advance that ambition in one swoop.
The ability for US-based hardware makers to seize upon any tariff-related advantage will depend, though, on whether their prospective customers, the US mining firms, can withstand a period of acute economic instability that those same tariffs stand to aggravate. The company’s headline client is US-based MARA Holdings, a publicly traded bitcoin mining firm that helped to launch Auradine and now owns an $85.4 million equity stake in the business. The tariff hikes alone are not enough to drive bitcoin miners out of the US; by comparison to the price of energy, say, the cost of a hardware import levy has only a small impact on the viability of a mining operation, claims Thiel.
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